Revolution 1989 (72 page)

The president of the tribunal, Colonel Gica Popa, was well known as a Ceausescu courtier. A paunchy fifty-seven-year-old, he was a good friend of the dictator’s brother, Ilie, who was a Deputy Minister of Defence. On 1 March 1990, less than three months after the trial, Popa shot himself in a mysterious suicide. The causes have never been entirely clear. Popa was not the kind of man to have developed a conscience about the way the court proceedings were run or about his past relationships with the Ceausescu circle. At the time of his death he was facing investigation on a range of criminal allegations from embezzlement to murder.

In ancient Rome a
nomenclator
was a slave whose duty was to remind his or her master of the names of people with whom to exchange greetings. It was particularly important in the rampant office-hunting in the late days of the Republic. The word had good Polish ancestry, according to the
Great Polish Encyclopedia
. In medieval times, it was the Latin term for the list of properties owned by the great landed magnates, and of the tenants who lived in them. The Communists simply borrowed it with no sense of historical irony.

Kuklinski was one of the most valuable agents the CIA ran during the Cold War. In 1971 he volunteered himself as a spy for the Agency in a letter dispatched to the American Embassy in Bonn and for the next decade he passed on a series of vital military secrets to the West in more than 30,000 documents. They included Warsaw Pact battle plans, technical diagrams on new ranges of missiles and intelligence. He was active for nearly ten years until he defected in 1981. Three years later he was sentenced to death, in absentia. The sentence was rescinded in 1989, but Kuklinski was never officially pardoned and many Solidarity supporters who loathed communism and the Russians - such as Lech Wałesa - always regarded him as a traitor.

Most of the few women doctors, teachers and other professionals who qualified in Afghanistan were trained in the brief period the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PPDA) were in charge of the country. Naturally none of them were permitted to practise their chosen professions after the Islamists came to power a few years later.

A cheerful, bearded, witty polymath, he wrote under the pseudonym Dawid Warszawski.

Casey was firmly convinced that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul in May 1981. Though his deputy, Bob Gates, conducted an exhaustive inquiry that started from the premise that the Soviets were responsible and all that was needed was to find the proof, no evidence has been found linking the KGB with the crime. In fact, the best evidence suggested the Soviets were not involved. That did not deter Casey, though, who believed to his dying day that the KGB tried to murder the Pope through a bungling amateur assassin from Turkey, Mehmet Ali Agca.

The three lower-ranking officers directly involved in the murder, Lieutenant Leszek Pekala, Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski and Lieutenant Waldemar Chmielewski, were originally sentenced to twenty-five years in jail, but three years later their sentences were reduced to between six and ten years. The senior officer who ordered them to commit the crime, Colonel Adam Pietruszka, received a twenty-five-year sentence, reduced in 1987 to ten years. Efforts were twice made in the 1990s to prosecute more senior commanders, but both trials collapsed when the prosecution produced insufficient evidence.